We interrupt your regularly-scheduled tech blog for a sports column.
Lance Armstrong announced his retirement yesterday.
The greatest athlete of our time will try once to defy time before leaving the stage for whatever life might be left to a cancer survivor with no lymph system.
A lot of people have asked, over the years, whether Lance's success is all due to drugs. Of course it is. But these are drugs you don't want to take.
People forget just how much cancer this man had. It was everywhere. It was no longer testicular cancer. Before it was caught it had metasticized and gained transport throughout the lymphatic system. It was everywhere, in his lungs and his brain, everywhere.
The only way to kill it was to nearly kill him.
The miracle isn't that Lance then won the world's hardest athletic event six times running, and might yet win a seventh. It's that he lived at all. It's that he lives today. It's that he has committed what is left of his life to inspiring other patients to live strong and survive.
I'm proud his farewell will start in my home state of Georgia. I think the coming Tour de France will be an epic event. I frankly don't expect him to win.
Even those who beat cancer can't beat time. Miguel Indurain failed in 1996 after dominating the race for five years. Bernard Hinault fell to Greg LeMond after dominating for a decade. A 32 year old cyclist has a tough time beating an equally-gifted 26 year old to the line. Guile and desire go only so far and no further.
This is the life lesson the Tour de France traditionally teaches. This is what it's all about. Age is the great leveller.
I got a taste of this over the weekend. I did my own 30 mile ride and included Silver Hill, near Stone Mountain. It's a bump on the road for the Tour, a mere bagatelle. Darned thing nearly killed me.
Time was the only lesson le Tour taught until Lance Armstrong came back to it in 1999. Many Americans feel it wouldn't be right for him to lose his last Tour, but it would be very French.
Either way, win or lose, it's a great story, and I will cry at the end. There will never be another like him, the greatest pure athlete of all time.
He lives. That's the miracle. Relish it.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
1. lindon on April 20, 2005 09:09 PM writes...
You right, so right. This man is prob. the greatest athelete of his generation, ignore those who say he ONLY rides the tour and wouldn't be as good if he rode the rest of the season, Winning the tour once a a mammoth effort, six times? A freak.
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